THE JOYS OF BEING A WOMAN by WINIFRED KIRKLAND Italics are in _italics_ format Page numbers are in < > brackets The table of contents is "as is" (it needs cleaned up) One {sic} for a typo. Etext prepared with the use of Calera WordScan Plus 2.0, by CEK This text is in the PUBLIC DOMAIN, posted December 1993. The Joys of Being a Woman AND OTHER PAPERS BY WINIFRED {Margaretta} KIRKLAND {1872-1943} Essay Index Reprint Series BOOKS FOR LIBRARIES PRESS FREEPORT, NEW YORK First Published 1918 Reprinted 1968 LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOG CARD NUMBER: 68-8477 PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA FOREWORD _The Ego in the Essay_ We are each launched in life with an elfin shipmate-- set jogging upon earth beside a fairy comrade. When our ears are clear, he pipes magic music; when our feet are free he pleads with us to follow him on witching paths. We cannot often hear, we cannot often follow, but when we do, we know him for what he is; when we sail or run or fly with him, we know him for the gladdest fellow with whom life ever paired us, a companion rarely glimpsed, but glorious, for he is our own true Self. Poets and dreamers have sometimes snared him in a sonnet, but for the most part, for his waggishness and his wanderings, he demands, not the strait-jacketing of poetry, but the flexible garment of prose. It is the shifting subtleties of the essay that have ever best expressed him. One man there was in that peopled past, where friendship's best doors fly open at our knock, who knew how to catch his elusive Ego and keep it glad even on ways that led through sordid counting-house and sadder madhouse; and who knew also, better than any one since has ever known, how to envisage and investure that exquisite Self of his, sweet, quaint sprite that it was, in an essay. Ever since that time those of us who love essays say, of one possessing special grace, it is like Elia's, meaning not that it imitates Lamb's style, the inimitable, but that it reveals, as only the essay can do, personality. Of all literary forms the personal essay appears the most artless, a little boat that sails us into pleasant havens, without any sound of machinery and without any chart or compass. To read is as if we overheard some one chatting with that little merry-heart, his own particular Ego. We do not stop to think what childlike simplicities any grown-up must attain before he can hear that fairy divinity, his own Self, speak at all, for the only true tongue in which the Self speaks is joy. Only childlike feet can follow the feet of fairies. The self-annalist whose essays warm our hearts with friendship, must be one who sips the wine of mirth when all alone with his own Self. Not many such are born, and fewer of them write essays. The essay is no easy thing. The true mood and the true manner of it are rare. It is as difficult to write an essay on purpose as it is to be a person on purpose, a teasing game and unsatisfactory. Yet the difficulties of essay-writing are offset by the delights: for there is nothing so compelling to expression as chuckle, and that is what the true essay is, sheer chuckle; it is what we felt and saw that time the elfin Ego floated in on a sun-mote, and showed us, laughing, how all our life is gilded with fun. Then off we fly to write it, with the spell still upon us! The poising of a word on the tip of our pen until the very most genial sunbeam of all shall touch it, the weaving the thread of a golden thought in and out through all the quips and nonsense, the wrapping a whole life experience in the hollow shaft of some light-barbed phrase! The best quality of the humorous essay is that the reader shall smile, not laugh, and, moreover, that he shall remember no one passage at which he smiles: it is far better that he should feel that he has touched a personality tipped with mirth. Ariel never laughed. The fun that makes the soul expand must have in it the lift of wings and the glimpsing fantasy of flight. More than any other of the shapes prose takes, the essay should give the reader a sense of good-fellowship. Probably the writer who as an actual man is shyest, gives this com-radeship best. The shy man sheds forth his personality most opulently in print, and preferably, as certain wise editors have perceived, in anonymous print. One is sensitive to having an everyday friend see one's soul in public, because the everyday friend knows too well the everyday self, to which the elusive essay-self is too often a stranger. That skittish elfin Ego, so alien to the humdrum man or woman who bears our mortal name, if he only came to visit us oftener, stayed with us longer, what essays we might write! A snatch of song, a tinkle of laughter, a flutter of wings, if he would only linger until I could clearly see what he is, this Ego of mine, who tells such happy secrets! Poor babykin, poor fairykin--that Ego sent forth with us to make blithe the voyage, we cannot go a-dancing with him out to fairy fields, because our feet are heavy with Other People's clogs and fetters, we cannot hear when he would whisper at our ear gentle philosophies--our own Self's and no one's else, because of the grave grubby Book-people who thunder at us from our shelves. Sometimes I catch him casting a waggish twinkle at me over the very shoulder of my blackest worry, rainbow wings and head that is devil-may-care trying to get at me from behind her sable-stoled form. Even in the thought of death I catch his cherub chuckle, "Could a grave hold me?" For is not death also a bugbear of Other People, not at all of my own Self's making? Gay little voyager! He seems, when he visits me, to be the prince of the kingdom of fun. He does not stay long, but long enough sometimes for me to write an essay. But whence he comes, or whither he goes, or what he is, whether demonic or divine, I only know that he is mine. CONTENTS FOREWORD: THE EGO IN THE ESSAY v I. THE JOYS OF BEING A WOMAN 1 II. A MAN IN THE HOUSE......... 23 III. OLD-CLOTHES SENSATIONS........ 29 IV.LUGGAGE AND THE LADY......... 35 V.DETACHED THOUGHTS ON BOARDING 49 VI.THE LADY ALONE AT NIGHT 62 VII. IN SICKNESS AND IN HEALTH 68 VIII. AN EDUCATIONAL FANTASY 75 IX. MY CLOTHES.................... 87 X.THE TENDENCY TO TESTIFY . 107 XI.LETTERS AND LETTER-WRITERS 113 XII. THE TYRANNY OF TALENT 124 XIII. THE WOMAN WHO WRITES 129 XIV.PICNIC PICTURES................ 154 XV.THE FARM FEMININE............. 17I XVI.A LITTLE GIRL AND HER GRAND- MOTHER...................... 183 XVII. THE WAYFARING WOMAN........ 194 XVIII. THE ROAD THAT TALKED....... 205 XIX. MY MOTHER'S GARDENERS 214 XX. My LITTLE TOWN...... 227 XXI. GENUS CLERICUM....... 244 XXII. SOME DIFFICULTIES IN DOING WITH- OUT ETERNITY...... 264 NOTE.-- _Several of these essays have appeared in_ THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY, THE NORTH AMERICAN REVIEW, THE UNPOPULAR REVIEW, and THE CHURCHMAN, _and are here reprinted with the kind permission of the editors of those magazines._ I _The Joys of Being a Woman_ Some years ago there appeared in the "Atlantic" an essay entitled "The joys of Being a Negro." With a purpose analogous to that of the author, I am moved to declare the real delights of the apparently downtrodden, and in the face of a bulky literature expressive of pathos and protest, to confess frankly the joys of being a woman. It is a feminist argument accepted as axiomatic that every woman would be a man if she could be, while no man would be a woman if he could help it. Every woman knows this is not fact but falsehood, yet knows also that it is one of those falsehoods on which depends the stability of the universe. The idea that every woman is desirous of becoming a man is as comforting to every male as its larger corollary is alarming, namely, that women as a mass have resolved to become men. The former notion expresses man's view of femininity, and is flattering; the latter expresses his view of feminism, and is fearsome. Man's panic, indeed, before the hosts he thinks he<1> sees advancing, has lately become so acute that there is danger of his paralysis. Now his paralysis would defeat not only the purposes of feminism, but also the sole purpose of woman's conduct toward man from Eve's time to ours, a course of which feminism is only a modern and consistent example. It is for man's reassurance that I shall endeavor gradually to unfold this age-old purpose, showing that while the privileges which through slow evolution we have amassed are so enjoyable as to preclude our envying any man his dusty difficulties, still our attitude toward these our toys is that of a friend of mine a woman aged four. Left unprotected in her hands for entertainment, a male coeval was heard to burst into cries of rage. Her parents, rushing to his rescue, found their daughter surrounded by all the playthings, which she loftily withheld from her visitor's hand. Rebuke produced the virtuous response, "I am only trying to teach Bobby to be unselfish." The austere moral intention of my little friend was her direct heritage from her mother Eve, whose much maligning would be regrettable if this very maligning were not the primary purpose of the artful allegory: Adam and all his sons had to believe that they<2> amounted to more than Eve, as the primary condition of their amounting to anything. Eve, in her campaign for Adam's education, was the first woman to perceive his need for complacency, and so, from Eden to eternity, she undertook to immolate her reputation for his sake. Eve, I repeat, was the first woman to perceive Adam's fundamental need, but she was not the last. The romance of Adam and Eve was written by so subtle a psychologist that I feel sure the novelist must have been a woman. Her deathless allegory of Eden contains the whole situation of the sexes: it shows the superiority of woman, while seeming, for his own good, to show the superiority of man. As it must have required a woman to write the parable, so perhaps it requires a woman to expound it. I pass over the initial fact that the representation of Eve as the last in an ascending order of creation, plainly signifies that she is to be considered the most nearly, if not the absolutely, perfect, of created things. The first thing of real importance in the narrative is the purpose of Eve's creation, to fill a need, Adam's. "It was not good that the man should be alone." The whole universe was not enough for Adam without Eve. It neither<3> satisfied nor stimulated him. He was mopish, dumpish, unconscionably lazy. If he had been merely lonely, why would it not have been enough to create another Adam? Because the object was not simple addition, whereby another Adam would merely have meant two Adams, both mopish, dumpish, unconscionably lazy; the object was multiplication by stimulation, whereby, by combining Eve with Adam, Adam, as all subsequent history shows, was raised to the _n_th power. Intimately analyzed, the details of the temptation redound entirely to Eve's credit. Woman rather than man is selected as the one more open to argument, more capable of initiative, the one bolder to act, as well as braver to accept the consequences of action. The sixth verse of the third chapter cuts away forever all claim for masculine originality, and ascribes initiative in the three departments of human endeavor to woman. For no one knows how long, Adam had been bumping into that tree without once seeing that it was: (_a_) "good for food"; this symbolizes the awakening of the practical instincts, the availing one's self of one's physical surroundings, the germ, clearly, of all commercial activity, in which sphere man has always been judged the more active; (_b_) "the tree was<4> pleasant to look upon"; here it is Eve, not Adam, who perceives the aesthetic aspect; if man has been adjudged the more eminent in art, plainly he did not even see that a thing was beautiful until woman told him so; (_c_) "a tree to be desired to make one wise"; Adam had no desire to be wise until Eve stimulated it, whereas her own desire for knowledge was so passionate that she was ready to die to attain it. We all know how Eve's motives have been impugned, for when a man is ready to die for knowledge, he is called scientific, but when a woman is ready to die for knowledge, she is called inquisitive. The Eden narrative concludes with the penalty, "He shall rule over thee, that is, the price Eve must pay for Adam's seeming superiority is her own seeming inferiority. The risk and the responsibility and the recompense for man's growing pains, woman has always taken in inscrutable silence, wise to see that she would defeat her own ends if she explained. "And what was my reward when they had won-- Freedom that I had bought with torturing bonds? --They stormed through centuries brandishing their deeds, Boasting their gross and transient mastery To girls, who listened with indulgent ears And laughing hearts--Lord, they were ever blind-- Women have they known, but never Woman."<5> The methods and the motives of Eve toward Adam have been the methods and the motives of woman with man ever since. Eve's purposes, summarized, are fourfold: first, she must educate Adam; second, she must conceal his education from him, as the only practical way of developing in man the self-esteem necessary to keep him in his sex; third, Eve must never bore Adam, to keep him going she must always keep him guessing; and fourth, Eve must not bore herself; this last view of the temptation is perhaps the truest, namely, that Eve herself was so bored by the inertness of Adam and the ennui of Eden that she had to give him the apple to see what he and she would do afterwards. The imperishable philosophy of the third chapter of Genesis clearly establishes the primary joy of being a woman, the joy of conscious superiority. That it is the most profound joy known to human nature will be readily attested by any man who has felt his own sense of superiority shaking in its shoes as he has viewed the recent much-advertised achievements of women. How could any man help envying a woman a self-approval so absolute that it can afford to let man seem superior at her expense?<6> Woman's conviction of advantage supports her in using her prerogatives first as if they were deficiencies, and then in employing them to offset man's deficiencies. Man is a timorous, self-distrustful creature, who would never have discovered his powers if not stimulated by woman's weakness. Probably prehistoric woman voluntarily gave up her own muscle in order that man might develop his by serving her. It is only recently that we have dared to be as athletic as we might, and the effort is still tentative enough to be relinquished if we notice any resulting deterioration, muscular or moral, in men. Women, conscious how they hold men's welfare in their hands, simply do not dare to discover how strong they might be if they tried, because they have so far used their physical weakness not only as a means of arousing men's good activities, but also as a means of turning to nobler directions their bad ones. Men are naturally acquisitive, impelled to work for gain and gold, gain and more gain, gold and more gold. Unable to deter them from this impulse, we turn it to an unselfish end, that is, we let men support us, preserving for their sakes the fiction that we are too frail to support ourselves. If they had neither child nor wife, men would still be rolling up wealth, but it is very much better for<7> their characters that they should suppose they are working for their families rather than for themselves. We might be Amazons, but for men's own sakes we refrain from what would be for ourselves a selfish indulgence in vigor. Man is not only naturally acquisitive but is naturally ostentatious of his acquisitions. Having bled for his baubles, he wishes to put them on and strut in them. Again we step in and redirect his impulse; we put on his baubles and strut for him. We let him think that our delicate physique is better fitted for jewels and silk than his sturdier frame, and that our complex service to the Society which must be established to show off his jewels and silk, is really a lighter task than his simple slavery to an office desk. How reluctantly men have delegated to women dress and all its concomitant luxury may readily be proved by an examination of historic portraits--behold Raleigh in all his ruffles!--and by the tendency to top-hat and tin-can decoration exhibited by the male savage. The passionate attention given by our own household males to those few articles of apparel in which we have thought it safe to allow them individual choice, unregulated by requirements of uniform, articles such as socks or cravats, must prove even to men themselves how much safer it is that their<8> clothes-craze should be vicariously expressed, that women should do their dressing for them. Not only for the moral advantages gained by men in supporting us do women preserve the fallacy of physical feebleness, but also for the spiritual exaltation men may enjoy by protecting us and rescuing us from perils. For this purpose it is quite unnecessary that the man should think the peril real, but it is absolutely necessary that he should think the woman thinks it real. It does a man more good to save a woman from a mouse than from a tiger, as contributing more to the sense of superiority so necessary to him. The truth is that women are not really afraid of anything, but they perceive how much splendid incentive would be lost to the world if they did not pretend to be. For example, if women were actually afraid of serpents, would the Tempter have chosen that form just when he wished to be most ingratiating? But think how many heroes would be unmade if women should let men know that they are perfectly capable of killing their own snakes. The universality of the mouse fear roves its prehistoric origin, showing how consistently and successfully women have been educating men in heroism; in earliest times it probably required a whole<9> dinotherium ramping at the cave-mouth to induce primitive man to draw weapon in his mate's defense, but now to evoke the quintessence of chivalry, all a woman has to do is to hop on a chair at sight of a mouse. Woman's motive for suppressing her intellectual powers is exactly the same as her motive for not developing her physical powers. She is ready to enjoy and to employ her own genius in secret for the sake of the free and open growth of man's. She has wrought so conscientiously to this end that it is probable that the average man's belief in woman's mental inferiority is even stronger than his belief in her physical inferiority, for well woman has perceived the peril to man of his ever discovering the truth of her intellectual endowment. Man's energy cannot survive the strain of thinking his brain inferior, or even equal, to a woman's. This fact is the reason why women so long renounced all educational advantages; that at last their minds were too much for them, and that they were driven by pure ebullience of suppressed genius to invade the university, will more and more be seen by women to have been a regrettable mistake. There is much current newspaper discussion of the failure of the men's colleges<10> to-day to educate the young male, his utter obduracy before stimulus is despairingly compared with the effect of college upon the youth of past generations. I fear that the reason is simple to seek: men's colleges have deteriorated exactly in the ratio that women's colleges have improved. The course for women and women's colleges is therefore clear. Our history shows that we have, with only occasional lapses into genius, nobly sustained the requirements of our unselfishness. On rare occasions our ability has been so irresistible, and our honesty so irrepressible, that in an unguarded moment we have tossed off a Queen Elizabeth, a Rosa Bonheur, a Madame Curie, a Joan of Arc, a Hetty Green; but for the most part we have preserved a glorious mediocrity that allows man to believe himself dominant in administration, art, science, war, and finance. The women who have so far forgotten themselves as almost to betray woman's genius to the world, are fortunately for the moral purpose of the sex, exceptional, and the average woman makes a very creditable concealment of intellect. I am hopeful that as women grow in wisdom, their outbreaks of ability will be more and more controlled and sporadic, and man's paralysis before them be correspondingly infrequent, so that at some<11> future day, we may see woman again relinquish all educational privileges, and become wisely illiterate for man's sake. Our own intellectual advantages are as much greater than man's as they are more secret. No woman would put up with the clumsiness and crudity of a man's brain, knowing so well the superexcellence of her own, in the delicacy of its machinery, the subtle science required in its employment, the absorbing interest of the material on which it is employed, and the noble purpose to which it is solely devoted. As to our mental mechanism, it is so much finer than man's that, out of pure pity for his clogging equipment, we let him think logic and reason better means of traveling from premise to conclusion than the air flights we encourage him to scorn as woman's intuition. Nothing is more painful to a woman than an argument with a man, because he journeys from given fact to deduced truth by pack-mule, and she by aeroplane. When he finds her at the destination, he is so irritated by the swiftness of her passage that he accuses her of not having followed the right direction, and demands as proof that she describe the weeds by the roadside, which he has amply studied,--he calls this study his reasoning<12> process. Of course no woman stops to botanize when the object is to get there. No man ever wants to be a woman? No man ever longs to exchange his ass for our airship? No man ever envies us the nimbleness by which we can elude logic and get at truth? Our mental operations are keyed to the very sublimation of delicacy and rapidity, and they need to be, considering the subtleties of the skill with which we must employ them. Eve left it to us to educate Adam without his knowing it, and to keep him endlessly entertained. To educate, to amuse, and forever, calls for such exquisite manipulation of our own minds, calls for such individual initiative, such originality, as to provide woman with an aspiration that makes man's creative concern with such gross matters as art or letters, science or government, seem puerile and pitiable. What skill do the tasks of man, so stupidly tangible and public, evoke? How stimulating to be a woman! How dull to amble along like a man, with only logic to carry you, and only success to attain! Poor man is to be pitied not only for the crudity of his mental machinery and the creaking clumsiness of its movement, but for the dullness of the material in which he must<13> work. The truth is that there would be no sex to do the unskilled labor of the world, if women ever once let men be tempted by their superior employments. The surest way of keeping man to his hod-carrying is to let him think that woman spends all her secret hours sobbing for bricks and mortar. As a child must respect his toys if he is to be happy, so a man must respect the material he works in, and thus women foster his pride in making books, pictures, machines, states, philosophies, while women--make him! The subject to which we devote all our heads is man himself. Mine to protect, to nurture, to impel; My lord and lover, yes, but first my child. Man remains Man, but Woman is the Mother, There is no mystery she dare not read; No fearful fruit can grow, but she must taste; No secret knowledge can be held from her; For she must learn all things that she may teach." Our material, human, living, plastic, is immeasurably more marvelous than man's cold stone, cold laws, cold print. Unlike man's, therefore, our work can never be finished, can not be qualified and made finite by any standard of perfection. It is more fun to make a Plato than to make his philosophy, and at the same time to be skillful enough to con<14>ceal our creatorship, knowing that the condition of producing another and greater Plato is to let him have the inflation of supposing he produced himself. Now unless woman's efforts through all the ages to instill into man the self-satisfaction necessary to his success have gone for naught--which I cannot from observation believe--man could hardly help envying woman the splendor and the scope of the subject to which her intelligence is directed, to wit, himself. The ultimate purpose of woman's education of man transcends the grosser aims to which man's intellect is devoted. Woman wants man to be good, so that he may be happy. He was not happy in Eden, and so she drove him out of it. Woman's education of man she has for the most part succeeded in hiding from him, but the object of that education, man's happiness, has been so permeating that even man himself has perceived it. Man thinks he can manufacture his own career, his own money, his own clothes, and his own food, but no man thinks he can make his own happiness. Every man thinks either that some actual woman makes or unmakes his joy, or that some potential woman could make it. For a woman, love's young dream<15> is of making some man happy; for a man, love's young dream is of letting some woman make him happy. These views plainly argue that in relation to the supply of gladness, woman is the almoner, man the beggar. Since every one would rather be a giver than a getter, it seems impossible that no man ever wants to be a woman, in order to experience the most indisputable of her joys, the joy of dispensing joy. Reasons, however, why men should want to be women are more numerous and more cogent than it would be safe to let men know, so I am cannily concealing many. Among the few it may not be impolitic to divulge, is one that of course any man who reads has seen for himself. While we shall continue conscientiously devoted to our pedagogical duties, we have pretty well determined Adam's limitations, and need only apply to him a pretty well established curriculum, whereas we ourselves remain an undeveloped mystery that more and more attracts our imagination. Looking far into the future one may see man finished and fossilized, when woman is still at the stage of eohippus as "On five toes he scampered Over Tertiary rocks." <16> Even now women, looking far out to space, sometimes echo the glee of little cohippus:-- "I am going to be a horse! And on my middle finger nails To run my earthly course! I 'm going to have a flowing tail! I 'm going to have a mane! I 'm going to stand fourteen hands high On the psychozoic plain!" Now if any man, clearly perceiving his own possibilities, must envy woman the joy of having him for an experiment, how could the same man, if he should as clearly perceive woman's greater possibilities, help envying woman the joy of having herself for experiment? With this paragraph I have plumply arrived at feminism, and at the object of all my revelations, namely, to reassure men by stating that women do not intend to take themselves up as a serious experiment for ten thousand years or so; we shall not feel free to do so until we have taught Bobby to be unselfish enough to let us; he is not yet strong enough to try his own wings, much less strong enough to let us try ours. To allay man's fears, it may be well to elucidate some aspects of our actions. While there may be a little of eohippus<17> exaltation in feminism, it is so little as to be negligible; our main purpose is still our age-old business of teaching by indirection. There are recurrent occasions when Adam grows sluggish in his Eden, and women have to contrive new spurs both for his action and his appreciation. As whips to make a lethargic Adam move where he should move, Eve is brandishing two threats, one her economic independence, the other, her use of the ballot. Adam thinks she really means to have both. Now our threatening to march from The Home and invade business, and by that action to let business invade The Home, is very simply explained. Once again our purpose is unselfish: it gives Adam false notions of economic justice to form a habit of not paying for services rendered, so Eve conquers her shyness and pretends that she will leave The Home if he does not pay her some scanty shillings to stay in it. Even the dullest man has now become convinced that women can earn money, so that we hope that in time even the most penurious husband will perceive the wisdom of giving his wife an allowance, and that 's all we 've been after; and yet we have to make all this fuss to get it. If Adam were only a little easier to move, he would save us and himself a great deal of pushing.<18> Our suffrage agitation is as simple as our economic one. We mean only to wake you to the use of the ballot in your hands, when we ask you to give it to our hands. Already we have aroused you to two facts: if politics is too soiled a spot for your women to enter, then it is too soiled a spot for our men to enter, and therefore it is high time you did a little scrubbing; and also that if you refuse to enlarge the suffrage to admit desirable women, it is high time to consent to restrict it so as not to admit undesirable men. Again this is all we have been after, but again we have had to make a great deal of noise in order to wake you up. But feminism to the male mind suggests not only commercial and professional and political careers for women, but something less tangible and more terrible, the advent of a bugaboo called the New Woman, who shall devastate The Home and happiness. It is a strong argument for our superiority that there is nothing that frightens a man so much as a woman's threatening to become like him. Yet the time has come for frightening him, and we are doing it conscientiously, for, to confess truth, there is nothing that frightens a woman so much as becoming like a man. However, for his soul's sake, she can manage<19> to assume the externals of man's conduct, but not even for his soul's sake, much less her own, would she ever adopt his mental or spiritual equipment. Adam has such a tendency to ennui that the only way to keep him really comfortable is every now and then to make him a little uncomfortable. He was so well off in Eden, and consequently so dour and dumpish, that Eve had no choice whatever but to remove him from The Home entirely in order to save his character. We are hoping that we women of the present shall not be driven to such an extremity; for we know what her exile meant for Eve! We are busily fostering man's fear of losing The Home, as the best way of making him appreciate it, and so of preserving it for him, and for ourselves. As with The Home, so with the woman called New. She never was, she never will be, but to present her to man's future seems the only way of making man satisfied with the woman of the past. We have had to stir men to appreciate us as women, by showing them how easily we could be men if we would. The creator granted to Adam's loneliness an Eve, not another Adam, and should we at this late day fail the purpose of our making, and cease to be women? We have changed our manners<20> and conversation a little, for the better success of our scare, but the woman who sits chuckling while she tends man's hearth and him, is still as old-fashioned as Eve, and as new. Men, who always take themselves as seriously as children, have been easy enough to frighten by means of a feminism that seems to take itself seriously. A really penetrating man might guess that when women seem to be so much in earnest, they must be up to something quite different from their seeming, and he might safely divine that, however novel woman's purposes may appear to be, they will always be explicable in the light of her oldest purpose--man's improvement. Now man's improvement is a heavy task, and when nature entrusted it to woman, she gave her a compensating advantage. To become a genuine feminist, a woman would have to forego her most enviable possession--her sense of humor. Man can laugh, of course, noisily enough; but what man possesses the gift and the grace of seeing himself as a joke? Men who must do the work of the world are better off without humor, because they can thus more easily keep their eyes on the road, just as a horse needs blinders; but woman,<21> who directs the work of man, needs to have her eyes everywhere at once. By another figure, such rudimentary humor as man does have is merely an external armor against circumstance; but woman's humor is permeating, her armor is all through her system, as if her sinews were wrought of steel and sunbeams. A man never wishes to be a woman? Is it not an argument for the joys of being a woman, that no man seems to have had such fun in being a man that it has occurred to him to write an essay on the subject? II _A Man in the House_ There persists much of the harem in every well-regulated home. In every house arranged to make a real man really happy, that man remains always a visitor, welcomed, honored, but perpetually a guest. He steps in from the great outside for rest and refreshment, but he never belongs. For him the click and hum of the harem machinery stops, giving way to love and laughter, but there is always feminine relief when the master departs and the household hum goes on again. The anomaly lies in the fact that in theory all the machinery exists but for the master's comfort; but in practice, it is much easier to arrange for his comfort when he is not there. A house without a man is savorless, yet a man in a house is incarnate interruption. No matter how closely he incarcerates himself, or how silently, a woman always feels him there. He may hide beyond five doors and two flights of stairs, but his presence somehow leaks through, and unconsciously dominates every domestic detail. He<23> does not mean to, the woman does not mean him to; it is merely the nature of him. Keep a man at home during the working hours of the day, and there is a blight on that house, not obvious, but subtle, touching the mood and the manner of maidservant and manservant, cat, dog, and mistress, and affecting even the behavior of inanimate objects, so that there is a constraint about the sewing-machine, a palsy on the vacuum-cleaner, and a _gaucherie_ in the stove-lids. Over the whole household spreads a feeling of the unnatural, and a resulting sense of ineffectuality. Let the man go out, and with the closing of the front door, the wheels grow brisk again, and smooth. To enjoy a home worth enjoying, a man should be in it as briefly as possible. By nature man belongs to the hunt in the open, and woman to the fire indoors, and just here lies one of the best reasons for being a woman rather than a man, because a woman can get along without a man's out-of-doors much better than a man can get along without a woman's indoors, which proves woman of the two the better bachelor, as being more self-contained and self-contented. Every real man when abroad on the hunt is always dreaming of a hearth and a hob and a wife, whereas no real woman, if she has the hearth and the<24> hob, is longing for man's hunting spear or quarry. If she is indeed a real woman she is very likely longing to give a man the comfort of the fire, provided he will not stay too long at a stretch, but get out long enough to give her time to brush up his hearth and rinse his teapot satisfactorily to herself. A man's home-coming is not an end in itself, its objective is the woman; but a woman's home-making exists both for the man and for itself. A woman needs to be alone with her house because she talks to it, and in a tongue really more natural than her talk with her husband, which is always better for having a little the company flavor, as in the seraglio. The most devoted wives are often those frankest in their abhorrence of a man in the house. It is because they do not like to keep their hearts working at high pressure too long at a time; they prefer the healthy relief of a glorious day of sorting or shopping between the master's breakfast and his dinner. It is a rare _menage_ that is not incommoded by having its males lunch at home. It is much better when a woman may watch their dear coat-tails round the corner for the day, with an equal exaltation in their freedom for the fray and her own. A woman whose males have their places of business neither on the<25> great waters nor in the great streets, but in their own house, is of all women the most perpetually pitied by other women, and the most pathetically patient. She never looks quite like other women, this doctor's, minister's, professor's, writer's wife. Her eyes have a harassed patience, and her lips a protesting sweetness, for she does not belong to her house, and so she does not belong to herself. When a man's business-making and a woman's home-making live under the same roof, they never go along in parallel independence: always the man's overlaps, invades. Kitchen and nursery are hushed before the needs of office and study, and the professional telephone call postpones the orders to the butcher. The home suffers, but the husband suffers more, for he is no longer a guest in his own house, with all a guest's prerogatives; he now belongs there, and must take the consequences. Fortunately the professional men-about-the-house are in small minority, and so are their housekeepers, but all women have sometimes to experience the upheaval incident on a man's vacation at home; whether father's, or husband's, or college brother's, or son's, the effect is always the same: the house stands on its head, and for two days it kicks up its heels and enjoys it, but after two-weeks, two<26> months, that is, on the removal of the exciting stimulus, it sinks to coma for the rest of the season. The different professions differ in their treatment of a holiday, except that all men at home on a vacation act like fish on land or cats in water, and expect their womenfolk either to help them pant, or help them swim. They seem to go out a great deal,--at least they are always clamoring to have their garments prepared for sorties, social or piscatorial,--and yet they always seem to be under heel. Some men on a home holiday tinker all day long, others bring with them a great many books which they never read, and the result in both cases is that housekeeping becomes a prolonged picking up. All men at home on a vacation eat a great deal more than other men, or than at other times; but with the sole exception of the anomalous academic, who is always concerned for his gastronomy, they will eat anything and enjoy it,--and say so. A man at home for his holidays is always vociferously appreciative. His happiness is almost enough to repay a woman for the noise he makes, and the mess; yet statistics would show that during any man's home vacation the women of the house lose just about as many pounds as the man gains. But what are women for, or homes?<27> After all, you can have a house without a man in it if you are quite sure you want to, but you cannot have a home without one. You cannot make a home out of women alone, or men alone; you have to mix them. Still every woman must admit, and every man with as much sense as a woman, that it 's very hard to make a home for any man if he is always in it. Every honest front door must confess that it is glad to see its master go forth in the morning; but this is only because it is so much gladder to see him come back at night. III _Old-Clothes Sensations_ People whom penury has never compelled in infancy or adolescence to wear other people's clothes have missed a valuable lesson in social sympathy. In our journey from the period when we first strutted thoughtlessly in our Cousin Charles's castoff coat on to the time when we resented its misfit, and thence to that latest and best day when we could bestow our own discarded jacket on poor little Cousin Billy, we have successively experienced all the gradations of soul between pauper and philanthropist. Most of us are fortunate enough to put away other people's clothes when we put away the rest of childhood's indignities; but our early experiences should make us thoughtful of those who have no such luck, who seem ordained from birth to be all the world's poor relations. In gift-clothes there is something peculiarly heart-searching both for giver and recipient. This delicacy inherent in the present of castoff suit or frock is due perhaps to the subtle<29> clinging of the giver's self to the serge or silk. It is a strong man who feels that he is himself in another man's old coat. If an individuality is fine enough to be worth retaining, it is likely to be fine enough to disappear utterly beneath the weight of another man's shoulders upon one's own. Most of us would rather have our creeds chosen for us than our clothes. Most of us would rather select our own tatters than have another's cast-off splendors thrust upon us. It is no light achievement, the living up to and into other people's clothes. Clothes acquire so much personality from their first wearer,--adjust themselves to the swell of the chest, the quirk of the elbow, the hitch in the hip-joint,--that the first wearer always wears them, no matter how many times they may be given away. He is always felt to be inside, so that the second wearer's ego is constantly bruised by the pressure resulting from two gentlemen occupying the same waistcoat. Middle children are to be pitied for being condemned to be constantly made over out of the luckier eldest's outgrown raiment. How can Tommy be sure he is Tommy, when he is always walking around in Johnny's shoes? Or Polly, grown to girlhood, ever find her own heart, when all her life it has beaten under Anna's pinafore?<30> The evil is still worse when the garments come from outside the family, for one may readily accept from blood-kin bounty which, bestowed by a stranger, would arouse a corroding resentment. This is because one can always revenge one's self on one's relatives for an abasement of gratitude by means of self-respecting kicks and pinches. A growing soul may safely wear his big brother's ulster, but no one else's; for there are germs in other people's clothes,--the big bad yellow bacilli of covetousness. People give you their old clothes because they have new ones, and this fact is hard to forgive. There may, of course, exist mitigating circumstances that often serve to solace or remove this basic resentment. To receive gown or hat or boots direct from the donor is degrading, but in proportion as they come to us through a lengthening chain of transferring hands the indignity fades out, the previous wearer's personality becomes less insistent; until, when identification is an impossibility, we may even take pleasure in conjecturing who may have previously occupied our pockets, may even feel the pull of real friendliness toward the unknown heart that beat beneath the warm woolen bosom presented to us. Further, the potential bitterness of the<31> recipient is dependent on the stage of his racial development and the color of his skin. The Ethiopian prefers old clothes to new. The black cook would rather have her mistress's cast-off frock than a new one, and the cook is therein canny. She trusts the correctness of the costume that her lady has chosen for herself, but distrusts the selection the lady might make for her maid. On assuming the white woman's clothes, the black woman feels that she succeeds also to the white woman's dignity. The duskier race stands at the same point of evolution with the child who falls upon the box of cast-off finery and who straightway struts about therein without thought of his own discarded independence. I may be perceived to write from the point of view of one clothed in childhood out of the missionary box. Those first old clothes received were donned with gloating and glory; but later, in my teens,--that period so strangely composed for all of us out of spiritual shabbiness and spiritual splendor,-- sensations toward the cast-off became uneasy, uncomfortable, at last unbearable. The sprouting personality resisted the impact of that other personality who had first worn my garments. I wanted raiment all my own, dully at first, then fiercely.<32> No one who has passed from a previous condition of servitude to the dignity of his own earnings will ever forget the pride of his first self-bought clothes. At last one is one's self and belongs not to another man's coat, or another woman's gown. It is a period of expansion, of pride: when one's clothes are altogether one's own, one's pauper days are done. But it is best for sympathy not to forget them, not only for the sake of the pauper, but for the sake of the plutocrat we are on the verge of becoming; for our sensations in regard to old clothes are about to enter a new phase; we are about to undergo the ordeal of being ourselves the donors of our own old clothes. It was not alone for the new coat's intrinsic sake that we desired it; we coveted still more the experience of giving it away when we were done with it. There is no more soul-warming sensation than that of giving away something that you no longer want. The pain of a recipient's feelings on receiving a thing which you can afford to give away, but which he himself cannot afford to buy, is exactly balanced by your pride in presenting him with something that you can't use. The best way to get rid of the pauper spirit is to pauperize some one else. This is cynical <33> philanthropy, but veracious psychology. It follows that the best way to restore a pauper's self-respect is to present him with some old clothes to give to some one still poorer; for clothes are, above all gifts, a supreme test of character. It was the custom of epics to represent the king as bestowing upon his guest-friends gifts of clothes, but they were never old clothes. If you could picture some Homeric monarch in the act of giving away his worn-out raiment, in that moment you would see his kingliness dwindle. The man who can receive another man's old clothes without thereby losing his self-respect is fit to be a prince among paupers, but the man who can give another man his old clothes without wounding that man's self-respect is fit to be the king of all philanthropists. IV _Luggage and the Lady_ I write as one pursued through life by the malevolence of inanimate objects. My singular subjection to things was never brought so painfully home to me as during four months in Europe. Of course, my soul had been to Europe a great many times, but my body never, and now I was taking it, as well as certain scrip and scrippage for its journey. I chained up my soul and held it under lock and key while I took counsel with certain seductive guidebooks. These paternal manuals left no detail untouched, until there was no fear left for me of cabs or custom-houses, of money-tables or time-tables. It was all as simple as bread and milk. One thing all my guides inveighed against, a superfluity of baggage; with them I utterly agreed. A trunk was an expensive luxury on foreign railways: there stood ready always an army of porters to escort one's handbags. A lady could travel gayly with a single change of raiment; after a day's dust and soil, merely the transformation of a blouse, and behold<35> a toilet fit for any table d'hote. Moreover, so remarkable were foreign laundry facilities that on tumbling to bed all you had to do was to summon an obliging maid, deliver, sleep, and on the morrow morn, behold yourself all crisply washed and ironed. As to the expense of a trunk and the battalions of porters, the guidebooks were correct; as to the rest, they lied. The single blouse theory is all very well if you don't wear out or tear out by the way; and as to the laundry fallacy, do I not still see myself roaming the streets of Antwerp searching vainly for one single _blanchisserie?_ My conclusion is that one needs clothes and a right mind about as much on one side of the Atlantic as on the other. But I had not reached this conclusion when I bought my baggage, therefore I limited myself to two hand-pieces. For the first of these I had not far to search. It was that frail, slim, dapper thing, a straw suitcase. It was very light, just how light I was afterwards to discover, but before embarkation I regarded it with joy; it seemed to me suitable and genteel, with its sober gray sides and trim leather corners. With it I was satisfied, whereas from the first I felt misgiving about my second article of impedimenta. There was nothing genteel or ladylike about this, that was certain,<36> but perhaps I am not the first traveler who has yielded to the mendacious promises of a telescope. It looks as if it would so obligingly yield to the need either of condensation or expansion. You may inflate or contract at will, and it's all the same to the telescope. My telescope was peculiarly unbeautiful. Its material was a shiny substance looking like linoleum, called wood fiber, and having a bright burnt-orange color. Its corners were strengthened with sheet iron, lacquered black. You have seen the same in use by rural drummers, but rarely in a female hand. I don't know why I bought it. It is part of my quarrel with inanimate objects that they always exert an hypnotic influence upon me in the shop, and always excite loathing so soon as they arrive at my home. In this instance it was both the saleswoman and the purchase that excited the hypnotism. She was of that florid, expansive, pompadoured type that always reduces my mind to feebleness. Moreover, she jumped up and down on my prospective telescope, bouncing before my eyes in all her bigness. Now, in my sober senses I do know that one's primary motive in purchasing a handbag is not that one may dance upon it; but at that moment, as I watched her pirouetting as if on a springboard, I felt that<37> no piece of luggage was anything worth unless you could jump upon it. I bought. Almost at once that tawny bedemoned box began its career of naughtiness. The first thing it did on shipboard was to disappear. It stopped just long enough to be entered in the agent's book, and then it leaped down into the hold and hid. I searched; the purser searched; so did six several stewards and stewardesses. The stewards searched the staterooms; I searched the passages; together we searched the hold, penetrating even the steerage to see if the missing article were congregating with the motley collection down there. We were four days out when, in a passage repeatedly searched, on a ledge near a porthole, behold my tawny telescope leering at me! My steward was genuinely superstitious over it. So was I. It was during my first travels on land that I discovered that a capacity for being jumped upon, far from being a recommendation in a piece of luggage, is distinctly a detraction. I did a great deal of jumping during three weeks in Scotland. I am sure I shall have sympathizers when I declare my difficulties in packing a telescope. In the first place, it is very hard, when both ends are lying on the floor, supine and gaping, to distinguish which<38> is top and which is bottom. It is only after sad repacking that you discover that while top will sometimes go over bottom, bottom will never go over top. Having ascertained which is bottom, you begin to pack. You soon are even with the edge; but in a telescope this is nothing. You continue to pack, up, up into the air, a tremulous mountain of garments upon which at length you gingerly place top. Firmly seating yourself at one end, you grasp the straps that girdle the other, and bravely you seek to buckle them. Result, while that end of the telescope on which you are sitting undoubtedly settles under your weight, from the gaping mouth which you are attempting to muzzle there is belched forth an array of petticoats, blouses, collars, postcards. You dismount, reopen, replace scattered articles, and reseat yourself on the opposite end. Result, the end which sank under you before now pops wide, and spouts forth a stream of Baedekers red as collops. Again you repack all, replace top. Starting from across the room, with a running high jump, you aim to land on the very middle of the thing. Result, the top goes down, it is true, but from all edges there dips a fringe of garments. In the privacy of your room, with the assistance of Heaven and the chambermaid and the Boots,<39> you may sometimes contrive to shut a telescope; but I once had to open and restrap mine, sole and unaided, in the waiting room of a station. It happened that I had placed my ticket to London in the toe of one shoe, placed the shoe in the bottom of the straw suitcase, locked this, placed the key in the toe of the other shoe, and placed that in the bottom of my telescope. Why did I do this? Simply because I had just visited Melrose Abbey. I frequently suffer from a tendency of my costume to disruption in moments of stress. At times of great muscular exertion and mental excitement my hat tends to take an inebriate lunge, each several hairpin stands on end, my collar rises rowdyish from its moorings, impeccable glove fingers gape wantonly. All these circumstances attended the closing of my telescope on that occasion. It was immediately after that I decided upon the necessity of a third piece of baggage. I bought it in Edinburgh, on Princes Street, the wonderful street where you vainly seek to apply yourself to mundane shopping with Edinburgh Castle ever filling your vision, standing over there on its craggy hill, all misty with legend, while a hundred memories of Mary Queen of Scots come whispering at your ear as you soberly endeavor to buy gloves. If <40> my previous impedimenta had been outrageously American, my third handbag was Scotch, every inch of him. He was gentlemanly and distinguished, frank and accommodating. I have never seen anything like him over here,--shiny black sides of oilcloth, bound by leather strips, plentifully studded with tacks, but otherwise strictly unornamented. But his chief charm was the way he opened, the whole top flapping easily apart at will, and afterwards the two sides closing over all as easily as if his only desire were to please. In capacity he was unlimited; you could pour into him, on and on, and always he closed upon his contents smilingly, without protest. For a brief space, as I trickled down through England from cathedral to cathedral, my Scotch companion was my chiefest comfort, the mere sight of his black, rising-sunshiny face cheering me as it looked down upon me from the luggage rack of a third-class carriage. More and more I came to impose upon the generosity of his interior, until one day my confidence in his Scotch integrity was rudely shattered; for I discovered that the reason he could hold so much was that he had quietly kicked out his bottom! He continued to accompany me, it is true, but thrust from<41> his high gentlemanly estate, resembling now rather those bleary, dilapidated Glasgow porters that greet one's arriving vessel, his frail form, like theirs, begirt and bandaged in order to support the few light belongings I now dared to entrust to his feebleness. Meanwhile, the strength of my yellow telescope continued unabated, but so did also its averseness to accommodating my possessions, which daily, all unwittingly and unwillingly, increased. My dapper suitcase had suffered by the way, its neat sides were bruised and staved in, one leather corner was missing, another stood up like an attentive ear. It still smiled, "brave in ragged luck," but its own America would not have known it. It now appeared that England, and as it happened, rural Devon, must contribute another article to my retinue. Now, ever since I had touched Great Britain, my unaccustomed eye had been fascinated by a piece of luggage quite new to me. I mean that most British thing, the tin trunk. We have nothing like it in luggage, but we have copied it exactly in cake boxes; the only difference is that the English original has a bulge top and a lock and key. In character my British baggage was much better natured than my American telescope, but in color it<42> was much the same, orange tawny; it had grown very easy for me to spot my belongings in the miscellany of the luggage van. These representatives of the American, Scotch, and English nations followed in my wake from Southampton to St. Malo, and perhaps their company need never have been increased on the continent if in Brittany I had not bought a pair of sabots, life size. Nothing so unaccommodating as sabots! Seemingly each was big enough to sleep in, but if I attempted to pack the inside of one, behold, it would hold nothing at all; it was built to hold a foot, and if it could n't have a foot, it would have nothing. In true peasant insolence, each sabot demanded a whole handbag to itself, and, once in, refused to accommodate its substantial bulk to the needs of any of my other possessions. In much difficulty I managed to get across France, but once in Paris, especially in view of certain aristocratic purchases that absolutely refused to consort with wooden shoes, the need of still a fifth handpiece was evident. Paris luggage, like a Paris lady, is built to show a pleasing exterior. Diversion rather than utility is its motive. My Paris handbag still preserves its suggestion of perpetual picnic. It looks as if it were always just off<43> for a Sunday in the Bois. It is a woven wicker thing, exactly like an American lunch-basket, vastly magnified. The handle must be grasped from the top, and is not the handy side appendage of all American grips. I never look at it without seeing within dozens upon dozens of boiled eggs and sandwiches. As a matter of fact, it has never held anything of the sort; rather it carried my new Parisian costume safely from Paris to New York. By dint of fast and furious touring through Belgium I managed not to acquire anything more to pack or to be packed, but in Holland once again I fell. I was within a few days of sailing when I visited Alkmaar. There a tall polyglot young Dutchman showed me through a most delicious cheese factory. Innocent and round, ruby or orange, smiled those cheeses down at me from their long shelves. My guide gave me to eat. Thus it was that the last thing I bought on the other side was cheeses! Oh, he assured me, they were perfectly well behaved; even had they so desired they could not get out of their strong cases; no more innocent gift to be taken home to appreciative friends. That Dutchman understood American credulity better than he did the American language. Those cheeses did not stay in their cases. They came out<44> and performed in all ways after the manner of cheeses. Now throughout my trip, whatever inconveniences I might suffer by reason of possessions acquired, I could never make up my mind to abandon any. Having bought them, I did not desert my cheeses, but it became increasingly apparent that they would have to travel in a home of their own, together with such of my goods as would not be corrupted by evil communications. I purchased my last bit of luggage in Rotterdam. It was a gray canvas bag, in shape like a dachshund without the appendages. It was capable of as much lateral expansion as a Marken fisherman. It received and held the cheeses, but frankly, so that their contour was clear to the eye. To all appearances I was taking home a bushel of turnips out of brave little Holland. I embarked at Rotterdam, and for ten days sank into that state of coma to which ocean travel stimulates me. It was not till we had touched the Hoboken dock that I became once more acutely alert. I had donned my Paris traveling dress, had walked through the great shed until I found my letter X, and then turned about to wait with the rest for the arrival of my luggage. Then for the first time realization overwhelmed me. I was waiting<45> for my bags, _my_ bags; those six disreputable traveling companions would here and now seek me out and claim my society, right here in America, with V and W to right of me, Y and Z to left, my haughty steamer acquaintance, looking on! Over on the other side one is not known by one's baggage, but here one is! I had faced many a white continental porter with nonchalance, but with which one of my motley collection in my hand could I face the black Pullman porter of my own country? I cowered with shame, so slowly they arrived, each several one of the six, tediously threading its way to X, never losing itself, never losing me, always hunting me down! The joy of home-coming was turned to gall. I saw V and W, Y and Z, turn away their faces. To my eyes each several hand-piece looked more bizarre than the last. Which one should I select to accompany me on an American railroad? Which of the motley crew would least endanger the respectability of a lady traveling alone in an American car? Through the crowd my Parisian lunch-basket came mincing up to me, still ready for perpetual picnic. Silly chit! I would n't travel with her. My Rotterdam purchase, bulging and redolent with cheeses, came waddling up, respectable perhaps, but with it I should have been as<46> conspicuous as with one of the Marken imps in copious trousers that it so much resembled. My former pride of Scotch travel was now so fallen away that he looked as if he were in the last stages of his native whiskey, and as if his physique would hardly have supported the weight of a hairpin. No help to be had in him! My American suitcase, in May so trig and debonair, had been punched and pounded out of all semblance to anything belonging either to America or a suitcase. My British cakebox had suffered likewise, and in its decrepitude supported the loss of a lock, and appeared to my horrified eyes carefully roped with clothesline by a friendly steward. Even though I promptly sat down upon it, spreading my Paris skirt wide, I could not conceal that yellow cake-box from the fashionable steamer folk that swarmed about me. Suitcase and tin trunk both had lost all distinction of nation; they both belonged now to the international species, tramp. There remained to me only my evil genius, the orange-tawny telescope. Foreign labels had but scantily subdued the natural aggressiveness of his demeanor. He was possible--perhaps. Then I considered how he had flouted me, scorned me, spilled out at me, jeered at me in my helplessness. I pictured opening and shutting<47> him in the berth of a sleeping car; then quietly, inconspicuously, and virulently, I kicked him. I fastened the last strap the customs officers had loosened. Just one moment I hesitated, regarding my rakish European retinue, then I fell upon the waiting baggage-agent. "Check them all," I cried, "all!" Free as a bird, as a gypsy, as an American, I traveled from New York to Chicago, a lady luggage-less. V _Detached Thoughts on Boarding_ Boarding is a puzzling and provocative subject for any student of human nature. Some clue to its psychology is revealed by the fact that even Adam and Eve got tired of it. Eden itself could not keep them from wanting their own menage. One can conjecture the course of their growing ennui and irritation as the suspicion dawned upon them that in Paradise they were not getting all the comforts of home. Having nothing to do but board, they probably conversed a great deal about their food, when the celestial ministrants were out of earshot, and eventually decided that they could have run the table a great deal better themselves. Then, too, they had no privacy, they were absolutely at the mercy of any archangel who might choose to drop in on them. Possibly, also, Eve felt that Eden was no sort of place for bringing up children. They might be spoiled by the attentions of other boarders, elephant or ape, fish or fowl, any one of a perfectly indiscriminate menagerie,<49> while she herself, as a mother, might be subjected to constant advice from angels who did not know one thing more about human babies than she did herself. After Eve had thought over these matters for some time, and whispered them all to Adam, she did what many another boarder has done since; she up and precipitated a crisis. The case of Adam and Eve is sufficiently typical to afford some light upon the puzzling effects of boarding, but not quite enough illumination to satisfy the psychologist. He is teased by the conviction that there is more in this matter than he can get at. Without an ultimate analysis of causes it may still be of interest to examine some results to the human spirit of both the selling and the buying of house-room, and to offer some tentative explanation of the curious phenomena that for many of us are too familiar for attention. We all recognize as a distinct human type the woman who keeps boarders. One writes woman rather than man, not that in strict accuracy one could say that men never keep boarders; when men do engage in the business, however, they do so by wholesale, never by retail, while it is precisely the increased personal intimacy of the retail relation that<50> occasions the peculiar blight incurred by the proprietor of a boarding-house, but escaped by the proprietor of a hotel. There is an expression familiar to our tongues, distressing in its figurative suggestion, which is frequently descriptive of the class under discussion, "decayed gentlewoman." No one knows whether a gentlewoman takes boarders because she has decayed or whether she decays because she takes them. Of course, not all women who take boarders are decrepit either in soul or body,--some of them are very buxom indeed; and, equally, not all are refined,--some of them are refreshingly vulgar; still, as a whole, the attributes inherent in the term "decayed gentlewoman" so generally characterize the profession that in whatever country one travels one is received by ladies so consciously redolent of better days as to shame a boarder for not having had better days himself. However adroitly they conceal their emotions, women who entertain paying guests generally have toward their occupation a feeling of perpetual apology or of perpetual resentment. Sometimes the apology element predominates, and then a blundering boarder had better be mindful of the sensitive toes of his hostess; sometimes the resentment is uppermost, and<51> then the boarder had better be mindful for his own toes. There is no reason why these facts should characterize so worthy a business, and there are conspicuous exceptions in which both the woman and the domicile remain invincibly warm-hearted and welcoming, but the rule still holds that only the rarest of women can invite the public into her home and not herself suffer from the exposure, only the rarest of women can as the mistress of a boarding-house still be perfectly herself. Having boarders, however, is not so demoralizing as being a boarder. The chronic boarder is an easily recognizable type, fat, fussy, futile, and usually feminine. This caustic characterization does not apply to women who go out by the day to any form of scrubbing, as doctors, lawyers, or what-not, professional women too busy for carping; it is the woman who has no profession except boarding that suffers its utmost injury. To give primary attention to the manner in which one is, fed and lodged has the same effect as any other reversion to an animal attitude. The faces of women who do nothing but keep house are always harassed; the faces of women who do nothing but board are always vacuous. Men-boarders in a house are<52> generally preferred to women; a he-boarder is more to be desired than a she-boarder because there is less of him underfoot. On the other hand, since a man can always beat a woman on her own ground whenever he thinks it worth while, a man who gives his undivided attention to his boarding can in fume and fuss out-boarder any woman. The insidious influence of boarding upon the spirit is most evident when we watch it operate upon a child. We all know the type of youngster that even the very best of boarding-houses is prone to produce. He is noisy, aggressive, self-conscious, and yet to sympathetic penetration profoundly pathetic. He knows that all his little life is overheard, that every room knows when he is scolded or spanked or entreated. A grown-up learns how to conceal his soul from even boarding-house scrutiny, but a child has no refuge except in slamming doors and thundering on the stairs and jumping into the secrets of those who have trespassed upon his own. The effect of boarding upon our own soul may best be seen by contrasting our reactions to our geography, according as we wake in the morning to find ourselves at home, in a friend's home, or in a boarding-house. At home our attitude toward the ensuing day is<53> one of absolute sincerity,--we expect to be our best self or our worst, for frankness is the chief comfort of kinship; if, on the other hand, we open our eyes in somebody's guest chamber, we marshal our forces to insure our good behavior, we owe it to our host to put out best foot foremost; but if we wake in a boarding-house? There our morning resolve reduces itself to the single sordid intention to get our money's worth. This latent hostility is ignominious and unworthy, but it is true. Yet we all know that any hostelry is richer in Samaritan opportunities than the road to Jericho. The detriment due to boarding does not confine itself to animate beings, but extends to the inanimate. In a boarding-house even the chairs look protesting and sat upon. The curtains seem exhausted by enforced welcome. The overworked kitchen has not enough pride left to keep its savors to itself. The piano has clattered until it has forgotten it was ever meant for music. The doom of dejection falls upon a boarding-house both without and within, so that one always regrets its entrance into a street cozy with homes. Its windows stare forth so blankly that the homes grow uncomfortable and move away. There is a blur over the face-walls of<54> a boarding-place obliterating the individuality to which every house has a right. This very absence of personality gives the boarding-house a certain personality of its own. The effort to analyze this character has made the boarding-house a favorite background with story-writers. Balzac, in "Pere Goriot," caught and reproduced its very soul as well as the soul of the homeless home-lover that it harbored. The frequency of the hall bedroom and the long table in magazine stories to-day suggests the wistful familiarity with both of writer and reader. The juxtaposition of types in a group bound together by no more congenial tie than the brute need of food and shelter has always opened a fascinating field to the romancer from Chaucer's day to ours. The mere mention of Chaucer's name is eloquent with contrast, for surely the Tabard was no bleak spot, but warm and tingling with hospitality. Yet even Chaucer's blithe company had a sharp eye and a gossipy tongue ready for each other's foibles, and if they had remained together too long, it would have taken more than mine host to keep them in order, but fortunately they had their picnic and parted. Another week or two and even the Canterbury pilgrims might have degen<55>erated into boarders, and dear knows what metamorphosis mine host the merry, might have undergone. To place Balzac's boarding-house and Chaucer's Tabard side by side is to produce a pregnant contrast. Yet if the primary purpose of both is akin, why the world of difference connoted by the word "boarding-house" and the world{sic} "inn"? Inn suggests comfort, coziness, congenial conversation, but, alas, it also suggests a dear departed day. The only inns left are survivors from dead decades, and they themselves have no descendants. "Mine ease in mine inn" is a phrase from the past. It is interesting to examine the difference in meaning of the three types of hostelry--hotel, boarding-house, and inn. The hotel does not try to be something it is not. It neither offers nor expects anything personal. Its purpose is to make money out of the visitor, as his purpose is to get comfort out of it. A hotel is not a home, and it does not pretend to be. Now a boarding-house is pathetic because it is always trying to be a home when it is not. It is we, the boarders, who are responsible for its being the wistful anomaly that it is, for at one moment we demand of it the indifference of a hotel and the next the coziness<56> of a home, and at all moments we ask of it that which money cannot buy--hospitality. The little word inn stands apart from those other two, hotel and boarding-house, and its charm lies as much in its literary aroma as its actuality. We visit inns oftener in books than in life, but in both they have the same characteristics. The tiniest inn is always big enough for personality. The innkeeper is a person, the guest is a person, the cook, the boots, the hostler, they are all real persons. There is time for flavoring food with conversation. The chairs are friendly and inviting. The hearth leaps warm with welcome. But note well, one sometimes lives at a hotel, one often lives at a boarding-house, but one never lives at an inn, one merely stops. The reason why the welcome and the speeding of an inn can be so warm and genuine is that host and guest never have too much of each other. Both can present their best foot for three days when a stretch of three weeks would strain its tendons. In an inn food never seems skimped, the financial aspect never seems prominent, because the guest never stays long enough to discover sordid secrets, nor long enough to have his own private affairs invaded. Company manners, the outward and visible sign of hospitality's inward and spiritual grace, can<57> prevail in an inn, for the simple reason that no matter how often one returns, exactly as often one departs. It is clearly easier to enumerate the effects of boarding upon human nature than to ascertain the psychological causes underlying them. One ventures to hazard a few random reasons, all interrelated and all growing out of the fact that we are still cave-dwellers at heart. The cave household feared and hated the stranger; and with good cause. They eyed him askance, exactly as the other boarders in a house eye the recent comer. The newest boarder never coalesces with the group until the advent of another still newer, when he is tentatively admitted to ranks needing union against the latest intruder. This survival of prehistoric manners may be observed and experienced in any boarding-house. The hostility of older occupants toward the stranger is exactly matched by his suspicion of them, hostile suspicion always, no matter how obsequiously concealed. When a cave-dweller penetrated the seclusion of another cave, he was wary, on the defensive, and this attitude made him critical of the inmates, of course, and therefore, for them, a person to fear. We are still afraid of the stranger, of his eye that may see, and his tongue that may<58> tell, our secrets. Boarding hurts us because we suffer continual abrasion of our reserve. In a boarding-house, family life has to go on in whispers; strangers are in our midst looking and listening, and even if they are friendly their attention is irksome: Eve got tired of having even the angels around all the time. The human soul demands retirement, but is often unwilling to pay the price. Homemaking is to be had only by house-keeping. In order to live by ourselves we have to take care of ourselves, and the effort to evade this issue drives us to the boarding-house. The home-keeping instinct is, however, as active in us as in our cave-dwelling ancestors, only they knew better than to try to suppress it. They knew they wanted seclusion, and so they rolled a rock to the cave-mouth, and possessed their souls in privacy. It is our doom to inherit from them a desire for our own front door, in order that we may not have to sue for entrance at some one else's door, and also that we may never have to open ours except when we do so in free and voluntary welcome. Boarding is often necessary, but it goes contrary to impulses as ineradicable in us as nest-making in a bird. Even the feminists, when they inveigh against family life, will be found riot free from prehistoric impulses toward<59> privacy. They do not advocate caravansary existence, but rather the group system, in all its cave-dweller isolation; only the group must be based on congeniality, not on mere arbitrary and accidental kinship. The joy of slamming our own front door upon the world is only equaled by the joy of flinging that door wide to the world when we wish to. Of all commodities hospitality should be free from money-taint. The trouble with boarding is that it attempts to buy and sell a welcome. Everything is cheapened the moment we can pay a price for it. The instant we lay our dollars on the counter, we have the right to criticize our purchase. A buyer does not have to say thank you with his lips nor yet with his heart, and this is why a certain uncouthness is to be incurred in any purely commercial relation. Hospitality is essentially not sordid, but spiritual: a host is gracious with the generosity that offers what money cannot buy, a guest is gracious with the gratitude that accepts what money cannot pay for. Boarding is an anomalous and enforced relation between people who offer and accept house-room, and only those can escape its blight who have the power always to elevate the commercial to the plane of the human and the friendly. Luckily, among this<60> small but noble company are many persons that board and many that take boarders. The existence of this minority does not alter the fact that for most of us boarding is a demoralizing occupation. The reason lies deep: hospitality, given or received, is too sacred for barter. VI _The Lady Alone at Night_ I am a lady, and a coward. The two facts have no relation to each other, but both are necessary to a comprehension of my sentiments about to be delivered. Soberly revolving the universe in my mind, I find only one thing of which I am sure I am not afraid, and that is--dying. I mean merest dying, for I am as fearsome as any of being tossed in air, _disjecta membra_, by an automobile; of furnishing lingering sweetness to an epicurean tiger; of being played with, and pawed and tweaked by disease, cat-and-mouse-like; it is only the actual slipping by the portal of which I am not afraid. With this sole exception, I am afraid of everything: firecrackers, reptiles, drunken cooks, dogs, tunnels, trolleys, and caterpillars. About ghosts I am a little uncertain; experience leads me to conjecture that ghosts are usually your own fault: that is, they are a little like rattlesnakes; if you don't intrude, neither will they. But that circumstance which is to me the very quintes<62>sence of terror is Night and A Man. I speak hypothetically--it has never happened. Strange what a difference mere plurality of a noun and mere presence or absence of an article make to my mind. Now Men, Man, and A Man stand for most diverse conceptions. _Man_,--I think of Mr. Alexander Pope, and of a creature of watery intellect, whose vitality is something between that of a frog and a jumping-jack, and who is diddled puppet-wise by an equally anaemic deity. Man is humanity dehumanized, but Men are about the most human thing there is. Men are the big people, clean-scrubbed spiritually and physically, who come to see you and take you about, and look after the universe, and keep it in a good humor; who, when you are making a fool of yourself, laugh at you in a genial, masculine fashion. In a thin, tentative, feminine way, you try to imitate, and the effort, however quavering, somehow makes you feet better. _Men_, of your own family or out of it, sometimes put you on trains, and take care of you--sometimes. Thus Men. But _A Man_-- ugh! I saw him first in a nightmare when I was six. He wore a black Prince Albert, and on his head three high hats jammed down one on top of the other. He stood on the cone of a hill, black as a coal<63> against the red light of fires in the rear. From under his three hats he grinned at me, and on that black hill, against that lurid sky, he danced and danced and danced. He frightens me still. It is since then that Night and A Man have been my crown of terrors. A Man lurks in every darkened doorway, stretches an arm from every tree trunk, pursues me,-- pat, pat, pat,--and fades into the common light of lamp and fire only when I am safely under my own roof-tree. Even in the daytime, A Man never deserts me: he haunts the solitary country lanes, lush and lovely with spring; he pops out upon me from mountain woods; on the stretches of beach he lurks just around the point. He is always there; at least, I suppose he is, for I never am--alone. By day, A Man is a leering horror, but at night he becomes, like that figure in my dream, pure devil. I am a suburbanite, and as I said before, a lady, a laboring lady. This is why I find myself not infrequently alone at night. The alarm set a-quiver when I descend from the social, bright-lit, suburban car and plunge forth into the dark is something that custom cannot stale. Yet sometimes the spell of the night is as a buckler against fear, making me wonder if solitude is really terror, genuine solitude, solitude belonging to me,<64> and not to A Man. I remember one early winter evening, white with a recent snowfall; there had been an ice storm, and our trees were all incased, each tiniest twig, and the full moon rode low: I forgot A Man, in every nerve I was glad to be alone, but hark, a step in the distance, and earth again! It is worth some study, the sensation of that approaching step, that emerging shadow,--bifurcated or petticoated, two feet or four? I am never afraid of two men: neither actually nor, grammatically can A Man be two. Joseph and the Babes in the Wood for precedent, dissension steps in between violence and its victim so soon as the aggressive party is multiplied by even two. And as for a group of men, whatever their caste or condition, however socially uncouth, by mere virtue of numbers they become a protection rather than a peril; by mere aggregate of protective instinct, A Man sufficiently multiplied equals _Men (supra)._ In addition to these distinctions in regard to the number of your potential aggressor, there are also distinctions geographic and geometric. I appeal to any lady of my sex and condition, whether there is not the greatest possible difference in amount of peril to be inferred between the man who is walking in<65> front of you on a lonely street, and the man who is walking behind. If a man paces on soberly and regularly some few discreet rods ahead, straightway he is enhaloed with succor and salvation,--you are safe, you need only to call him in your need, and he will save. But should he go more slowly, fall behind, then in the very instant of passing you this same protecting saint becomes decanonized, and worse. There is nothing so suspicious as this dropping behind. True, you preserve a bold back, walk no faster,--note, sir, my valiancy, my unconcern,--but still your knee crooks for flight, and your vocal cords contract for that scream you wonder if you could ever really utter. A corresponding transformation in moral intention, blackguard and chevalier, is possible for the man in your rear. On a recent evening I was hurrying home along the solitary street--steps behind! Flying, pursuing steps! Nearer, nearer! Upon me, and my heart sickened and stopped beating! But past me, fleeting on and on, disappearing, oh, too swiftly! For as he left me so quickly again to solitude, I could hardly resist an impulse to gather up my skirts and scamper after, after my retreating protector. I think he made his train. I have been at some pains to prove the sec<66>ond of my introductory assertions. The reason I have not tried to prove the first is explained by the difference between the essay and polite society. In polite society, one is under the obligation of confessing one's virtues, not blatantly, but none the less persistently, wearily,--one's dogging old virtues, as if it were not enough of a bore to live with them in private without having to be seen with them in public. In the essay one may have the exquisite pleasure of confessing one's vices. In society I must be a lady; in the essay I may be, as here and now, a coward. VII _In Sickness and in Health_ I have been sick, but not utterly,--a tooth. I am in the convalescent's mood of confidence and confession; therefore, I write in haste, for in health I am buoyant and amiable, and not fluently penitent; indeed, there is little then to be penitent about. For a week I have been very unpleasant, and the circumstance leads to remarks on the moral disintegration attendant upon indisposition. I speak of petty disorders, for illnesses of dramatic magnitude, a run of typhoid for instance, sometimes tend to spiritual upbuilding,--at least, it is so demonstrated in fiction. Doubtless the pawing of the white horse in the dooryard has a soothing effect upon the patient's nerves, but illnesses in which one has not the comfort of composing one's epitaph are not composing to the soul. The lesser ailments make appalling holes in our integrity: myself last week threw a teaspoon at my most immediate forbear. Ferocious, but it was the elemental ferocity of suffering. It is a fact, belonging rather to the<68> science of psychology than of medicine, that small sicknesses hurt more than big ones. I appeal to all connoisseurs in invalidism whether a tooth, an ear, an ankle, are not more direct in their methods of torture than pneumonia, smallpox, or appendicitis. Believing this, I have always had much sympathy for the vilified hero of a certain novelette of my acquaintance; in this romance, the husband has a tooth; the wife, a heart,--a literal heart, mechanical, physiological. Everybody knows which suffered more, and yet because the gentleman got a little crusty over a most outrageous molar, how joyously the author trounced him through page after page! I am hot with indignation. There ought to be a Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Creations. Manufacturers of heroes and heroines should not be allowed to flay and burn and quarter so wantonly as they do; a humane reading public should take from them the prerogative of so unnatural a parenthood. This one man should have been forgiven; he had a toothache, and non-fatal illnesses may make monsters of the meekest of us; but fortunately, the illness being temporary, so is the monster. Only the recollection is humiliating; I am recovered, but I shudder at the legion so recently cast out of me. Sickness<69> sets free all the processes of atavism, and whirls us back into savagery at a breathless rate. The first bit of baggage we leave behind us on this rapid return journey is family affection. Last week my kin stood about my couch day and night with poultices and sympathy in their hands. I took the poultices and tossed back evil words out of my mouth. I looked upon my relatives with frankest loathing. Why? Their insulting forbearance, their aggressive meekness, their poor-sufferer-here-is-my-other-cheek attitude stirred the foundations of my bile. Their serene patience provoked my utmost effort to destroy it, and I was impotent; their invulnerability was an affront to my powers of invention. My own possibilities of vituperation were only less surprising to me than the endurance of the abused. And all the time that I listened to my own reviling tongue, my self-respect was ebbing from me most uncomfortably,--and it was all their fault. A concomitant loss in this dissolving of our civilization is that of the sense of humor. Being so recently returned from barbarism and its beyond, I can confidently assert that the ape and the savage, while they may be laughable, do not laugh. In the sickroom of the not very sick, the brightest witticisms<70> seem only studied banalities. There is no comedy in the incidents of ministration; it is all unrelieved tragedy. Yet it is not the humorous, but the humor that is lacking, for frequently the situations are appreciated at recovery, and furnish us amusement at intervals for a lifetime. I doubt whether this suspension of the processes of humor could be established in the case of serious illness, admitting of disastrous outcome. There are soldiers a-plenty who have jested at their wounds, and instances enough on record where a timely jest or a merry incident has saved the day. I cite one such situation. A husband lay at death's door, and the door was ajar. It was midnight, and the wife watched. Suddenly the patient seemed to be sinking, slipping from her. She put the hartshorn bottle to his nostrils, but he could smell nothing. Both were terrified as they realized the import of this. Then the wife glancing down discovered that the bottle contained witch-hazel. The man laughed--and lived. In serious illness there is perhaps sometimes a positive stimulus to the comic sensibilities; there is such a thing as dying game, or the fight for life may be worth some bravado. But imagine feeling gamy with tonsillitis or a felon on your finger; there is absolutely no histri<71>onic appeal. If your sickness has no spice of fatality, you might just as well give up; you won't see the light of humor again until you recover. No love in our heart, no humor in our head, there is another evil of savagery thrust upon us by illness. It is the sudden acquisition of personality by inanimate objects. What possibilities of abusive conduct lurk within the four walls of a room yesterday, in health, perfectly inoffensive! What malevolence in the wall-paper! Such a sneaking, underhand, leering pattern for curtains with any pretensions to respectability! How tipsy the books look, crowding and pushing themselves askew for very perversity! No amount of chastisement will make the pillows conduct themselves comfortably. There is something about the billows of that malicious counterpane that makes me think of the oozy, oily, shiny unpleasantness of the ocean when the sailboat is becalmed. I am as much at the mercy of my furniture as any Fiji before his fetish. Thus sickness reduces us to cave-dwellers or gorillas rampant, by perhaps just a day of pain no greater in compass than one's little finger-nail,-- soulful, strenuous, high-stepping beings though we are! Sad enough to think about; yet on the other hand, of all<72> insupportables, the people whom sickness makes saints are the most contemptible. I know men and ladies, in health normal, human, unworthy, likable,-- but give them so much as a cold in the head, and at once their smile smacks of Heaven, and their eyes are uplift with the watery mysticism of those about to be canonized. When a small boy I know voluntarily allows his younger sister a canter on his rocking-horse, his nurse immediately applies red flannel and turpentine; generosity with him is a sure presage of sore throat. I have seen great strapping lads, full of sin, reduced to sudden and spurious sainthood by a black eye. There is no more unfeeling conduct than patient suffering,--- there is nothing more alarming to an anxious family than a course of virtuous endurance obstinately persisted in. So long as you rage and are unseemly your kinsfolk will never pipe their eye, but docility under the minor physical afflictions makes a stubbed toe as much a matter of apprehension as angina pectoris. This being good when sick is a bid for unmerited martyrdom. These gentle sufferers are likely to employ the emaciated voice of those who ail, knowing well that the bellow of rebellion is much too reassuring. I am glad I am not as one of these; sick, I throw things.<73> Thus all mankind and all woman and child kind, too, are divided, though unevenly, into those who are better in sickness and those who are worse. The marriage service on examination will be found to be a very canny document, and its compilers nowhere showed greater shrewdness than in just that little phrase which insures conjugal devotion in sickness and in health. For of some, sickness makes Mr. Hydes, and of others, Dr. Jekylls, and in the matter of spouses, how in the world can the contracting parties foresee, demon or angel, which will develop, or, having developed, which will be better company? VIII _A Educational Fantasy_ When I look back upon a half-century of wasted life, I find that there are no years that accuse me of neglected opportunity more poignantly than those between five and twelve. If only I had had the foresight then to apply myself with earnestness to the tasks set before me! If only now I possessed, those priceless stores of knowledge that I feel sure must then have been pumped into me! That I must have received abundant elementary instruction I feel confident, although I do not in the least remember receiving it. My purely academic activities at this period remain wrapped in obscurity, while other memories are lively enough. I distinctly recall the scientific invention displayed in our efforts, to produce new shades and colors in the soapy water with which we cleaned our slates. It was I who discovered that the yolk of an egg well beaten made a more satisfactory admixture than butter, even though both are equally yellow to begin with. I remember how one may by judicious spooning out with a pin, extract<75> the inner riches of a chocolate drop without visible disturbance of the outer crust. Despite my scholastic indifference, I can have been no sluggard, without spirit, for of my fifty coevals there was not one who could tag me in the open except Percy Dent alone, and that only (but in my wisdom I never let him discover the fact) when I would let him; well do I recollect with what _eclat_, with what flutter of petticoats and pinafore, I could execute a _pas seul_ at hop-scotch. These attainments, the thrill of which still warms me, prove me not without ambition;-- "Not for such hopes and fears, Annulling youth's brief years, Do I remonstrate," but for "Those obstinate questionings Of sense and outward things,"-- such as the multiplication table, and the capital of Arizona, and the difference between an adjective and an adverb,--questionings so obstinate that I am convinced that not even at ten years old did I know the answers; _hinc illae lacrimae._ To some extent it is possible to go back and piece out the stitches dropped in the course of an education; only, one is not allowed to go<76> back so far as I desire. Roughly speaking, I should say that life does not allow one to relearn what one has failed to learn before sixteen, whereas it is the knowledge belonging to eight years, and ten and twelve, after which I hunger and thirst. I wish some one would open a school for able-minded but ignorant grown-ups. Believe me, enough of us could be found to attend, enough of us glad to jump down from our college chairs, to leave out laboratories with their clutter of advanced research, our counting-houses with their problems, and gladly go to school, gladly learn once and forever how much nine times thirteen is, and build Vesuvius past and present out of clay, and follow out of doors some charming young lady who would tell us exactly what the birds and the wild waves are saying. But I stipulate at the outset that I will have no offensive superiority in my instructors. If I am to learn as a child I will be treated as a child. I will have no one caviling at me, for instance, because I do not know when Washington was born. I never did know when Washington was born, but I desire now to amend this my iniquity of ignorance, and I am even minded, if only my teachers will be patient, to plod on from the Revolution to the Civil War, and to learn the succession of bat<77>tles thereof, and which side won them. I wish my instructors to understand that my humility of spirit needs no augmenting on their part. I wish them to be as sweetly patient and cheerily maternal as they would be to my daughter's daughter. I wish my teachers to administer boundary lines but mildly, and to give me their minimum doses of mental arithmetic; for in mathematics and geography my mind is willing but weak. I think I could promise that patience in my instructors would have a reward in a proficiency of pupil such as they could never hope to win from the iniquitous immature, on whose preoccupied minds and thankless hearts they squander such devotion. What a joyous picture it is, as I conjure it up, this going to school again! What happiness to slip out of our grown-up households, and go forth into the morning, with bookstrap and luncheon in hand, to meet by the way our harried and over-busy acquaintance, men and women, some whiteheaded in ignorance, perhaps, all skipping and dancing along to the same glad place. Gleeful, we enter a sunny room with geraniums on the windowsill, bright maps on the wall, and a beautiful young lady at the desk. We are no longer hard and hardened children: our hearts as<78> well as our intellects are softened by the debility of age, and we appreciate the graciousness of our instructor with the rose in her belt, the milk of human kindness in her eye, and the carefully preserved smile upon her lips. It is with responsive smiles of gratitude that we feel arithmetic and history and geography trickling into our craniums from the cranium of our teacher. Then, when she feels that, still willing, we are perhaps grown weary with well-doing, she gives a signal, and with one accord we raise our cracked voices in ecstatic, yet instructive song, in which perhaps we are poetically informed of some new fact about the firefly, or the green grass, or perhaps our own gastronomy, or in glittering phrase we unweave the rainbow into the colors of the spectrum. Or, to forestall the ennui resulting from our too earnest effort, our instructor bids us stretch our cramped, rheumatic limbs, and with graceful contortions of her lithe young body, directs us as we prance stiffly through a calisthenic exercise. But it is not on these diversions that my fancy lingers most fondly, but on those more solid parts of our education. How happy I should be, for example, if I could only add, both in my head and on paper! How many bewildered and distrustful moments would<79> thus be eliminated from my existence! And if to a proficiency in addition I superadded an adeptness in subtraction, then perhaps on some proud day might my opinion of the bulk of my bank account approximate more nearly the opinion of the cashier. And if my rudimentary bump of mathematics were carefully manipulated according to the newest system of educational massage, I might even progress as far as percentage. I might learn how to be richer if I could once understand the allurements of compound interest. So much depends on the attitude of mind that I wonder whether, if I approached fractions in a spirit of friendliness rather than of enmity to the knife, they would reward me by allowing me an entrance into their intricacies, so that I could with impunity buy things on the bias, or estimate the reduction by the dozen of merchandise that tags a half-cent to its price when purchased singly. There are, besides, other valuable facts to be gleaned from the study of arithmetic, the possession of which would be matter for gloating. How proudly I should proclaim to some ignorant companion of a country stroll the number of feet in a mile! I should be happy to know under all circumstances the number of ounces in a pound, grocer's or apothecary's: how exalted I should<80> be if I knew the exact amount of a scruple, that being a fact of which I am sure most of my friends are ignorant. An exhaustive knowledge of weights and measures would not only entitle one to distinction among one's acquaintance, but would open up many new avenues of interest in one's daily life. History is another of the subjects for which I hanker; not history as it is administered to me now, spiced for the mature palate, with philosophy and evolution, the ebb and flow of tendencies, but history for the infant mind, the bread and milk of history, as it were. I have sometimes thought that historic research would be easier for me if sometimes I knew what men did before I was forced to understand why they did it; and a simple statement of what the actual fact is under consideration would clarify for me much of the historian's discussion of cause and effect. I have a distinct conception of the development of the great and glorious English people, but even such knowledge would be materially strengthened if I were able instantly to sort out all the Henrys and Edwards and stow them away in their proper cubbyholes among the embarrassment of decades. As to my own respected fatherland, I have discussed intelligently the growth of the spoils system,<81> skipping from presidential term to presidential term with all a grown-up's airy superiority; but ask me by whom and when and why North Carolina was colonized, or just what Captain John Smith was about when Pocahontas intercepted the executioner, and you have me. I want to study history at last fairly and squarely, out of a dapper little textbook that I can stow away handily in my brain, with fine fair outlines at beginning and end of it, and all important events made salient by heavy type, and a brisk brushing together of one's information by a _resume_ after each chapter. Such a primer would greatly assist me in my study of the metaphysics of history. Yet perhaps I do but hanker after impossibilities; perhaps this school I so happily image forth would refuse to teach me what I want to know. Possibly such information belongs only to the period of my negligent infancy. Perhaps my charming young teacher, exuding the wit and wisdom of the newest normal school, would refuse to stand and deliver the knowledge I long for. If I desired the facts of the French and Indian War, I might merely be set to building wigwams and drawing braves in war-paint with colored crayons on the blackboard. Perhaps after all<82> there is nobody left who knows how to teach the things I have forgotten. For example, do they now acknowledge in the primary curriculum that fair, old-fashioned study called penmanship? I yearn to be put once more into a copybook. I long to set forth once more wise saws in round _v_'s and unquestioned _e_'s and _i_'s. My fingers long since became callous and conscienceless to distinguish t from _l_, _b_ from _p_, and I wish somebody would reform the rascally old digits. It would be a great relief to my friends and myself if I could only become legible in my old age. One branch of knowledge little emphasized in my youth, however, I could be sure of receiving at the hands of my fair instructress of to-day,--I refer to that varied information known as "nature-study." I am greatly deficient in nature-study. I own to an unanalytical habit of mind as regards out-of-doors. So long as the wild flowers make a glory at my feet, I have never cared much to shred them into pistil and corolla and stamen. So long as the small fowls make me melody, I have never cared to know the color of their pin-feathers. But I would fain amend all this and die knowing something. I picture our band of eager grown-ups pouring over the countryside in the wake of our animated and instruc<83>tive conductor,--peering into the grass to lay bare the soul in the sod, blinking our old eyes to discover the bird in his coverts, cocking our dull ears to classify the notes of his song. I see us disporting ourselves over the landscape, busily seeking some curious knowledge, and then scampering back to our teacher with treasure trove of leaf or flower or pebble or captured insect. Sweetly she commends our application, and explains the exact nature of our find. We swell with knowledge momentarily, and return to more prosaic tasks elate, having hung its proper label on blade and bush, bird and bough. What a satisfaction it would be, after having lived with nature for a lifetime in awesome ignorance, to feel that one had at last assailed her and ascertained her secrets! As a young child, I must have been singularly limited in mental scope; I cannot otherwise explain my well-remembered aversion to geography. Those parti-colored maps streaked with inky rivers, and bordered by the wiggling lines of the Gulf Stream, filled me with loathing. The revolving globe, and that oft-repeated image which likens the earth to an orange flattened at the poles, seemed to me almost sickening. How bitterly do I repent my obstinacy! Besides, there is not one trace<84> left now of my former aversion. In fact, geography appeals to me to-day as if it were a brand-new branch of study, so well did I succeed in not learning it as a child. I have tried ever since reaching maturity to make up my geographical deficiencies, but with small success. Often do I find myself relegated to the dunce-seat in the minds of the company present. Despite my constant effort, there are certain countries that always elude my grasp, notably Burma and New Zealand, and there is always for me an airy insubstantiality about the entire continent of South America. Within my own beloved country, certain rivers have a way of turning up in unexpected States when I supposed that they had long comfortably emptied themselves into the ocean; and there are some cities which always flit with agility to and fro across the map. I wonder if my early antagonism to geography might perhaps have been due to a shrewd sense of its uselessness to me at that stage of my existence. Stay-at-home as I was, why trouble myself with strange lands until necessary? Yet I was lacking in foresight, and should be grateful now if only I had packed away some information against the day I should need it, whereas nowadays I find traveling without any knowledge of geog<85>raphy stimulating but inconvenient. This observation leads me to a broader one on the topsy-turvy nature of our present educational sequence: those studies most astute and useless we put in the college curriculum, and those most immediate and practical to the college graduate about to grapple with life, we relegate to the elementary school, where the children neither desire nor need to master them. I would suggest a turning about. Let the college youth and maid who will suffer from a lack of practical arithmetic learn to add a column accurately; let the irresponsible infant sport with trigonometry and conic sections. These subjects unlearned or forgotten, one could still go through life unfretted by the loss. So with other subjects forever lost to us because entrusted to the intelligence of careless infancy. I would teach geography and handwriting in the senior year at college, and put philosophy in the primary school. So would the young collegian go forth upon life well equipped, and not come to fifty years burdened with regrets for knowledge lost forever,--as I. I have kept afloat in higher mathematics, I have delved into the mines of science, I have trod air with many a prancing philosopher,--therefore who so well fitted as I to appreciate at last the peace of having a foundation! IX _My Clothes_ In the dear, naughty memoirs of Madame de Brillaye, not inaptly named by the author the "Journal of a Wicked Old Woman," you remember that scene in the pleasaunce at Chateau Vernot, where the turf was like fairy velvet and the trees were tortured into all manner of shapes unarboreal,--she liked to have her trees dressed, she said,--"There is something indecent in great naked branches sprawling the good God knows where." The little old lady is sitting with her great, old-ivory cane across her knees; she rolls it back and forth with her little old-ivory hands, while she scolds Aimee--as always. Aimee has just come through that brisk little encounter of hers with de Brontignac, and seems to have allowed her raiment to look a little battle-worn. "Go dress yourself, baby," cries Madame Great-Aunt. "Will you let your very laces whimper? Into your rose velvet brocade, and your chin will be jerked up as if by a string. Gowns have healed more hearts than they 've ever broken: the second, men's;<87> the first, women's. Now you think you have a soul; when you are my age, you will know that women are not souls, but dresses. I look back; my history is the history of my gowns: undressed, I do not exist; my clothes are myself." (A few lines above I used the word remember," but merely for the sake of an effective start-off. Madame and her memoirs do not exist outside of this paragraph. I am not the first to perpetrate a spurious quotation; I am merely the first to confess it. To proceed.) It is not the first time that the little old de Brillaye has set me thinking. Is she true in this passage, or merely epigrammatic? If my history is the history of my clothes, let me so study it out, formulate, as it were, the meditations of the pupa upon its successive integumenta. Yet the figure is infelicitous. In fact, the chrysalis image is not over-pretty as regards this side of eternity: pupa suggests the pulpy tenantry of the chestnut; this worminess may be liturgical, but it is unpleasant, is opposed to that sociability with one's self which makes life entertaining; there is nothing chat-worthy in a worm. Be it granted me to regard these accidental rags of lawn or wool or silk I find adherent, these hardly less transitory hands and feet, this hardly more durable incasing occipital, not<88> as a worm incarcerate, but with the detachment and uplift of the incipient butterfly. Why not _my_ philosophy of _my_ clothes, the pronoun italicized, meaning not Teufelsdrockh's, but my own, both the clothes and the philosophy? Let me here and now make some effort toward system and definition, toward order out of chaos, in that long chapter in a woman's story, my lady's wardrobe. How far have these successive wrappings around, and prankings out of diverse colors and tissues that are to my fellow passengers labels of my lone pilgrim soul, stating of what age, sex, nation, education, and caste I may be,-- how far have these clothes of mine served for triumph or undoing in my spiritual history, the life-history of this "celestial amphibian," myself? The clothes of babyhood first. It is a strong-minded adult who does not grow sentimental in regarding the garments of his infancy, those caps and bibs and socks reminding us of the wabbling heads, the aching gums, the simian feet, of the days when we, for all our present arrogance of maturity, were the sport of colic and nutritive experiment. How explain the repugnance of the newly born to clothing, the birth-wail that pleads for the sincerity of the nude, protests against<89> the cloakings of convention? Strange paradox that the first emotion of the baby soul should be bitterness against all those contrivances of decency, those hemstitched linens and embroidered flannels, through which the mother heart eased its brooding love. The little pink, squirming creature, fresh out of eternity, cannot be too quickly incased in the wrappings of finite human care. That is why we are so long in seeing ourselves as we really are; all the clothes and the conventions were ready for us; before we had a glimpse at ourselves we were popped into them; it is a merciful long while before we are old enough to undress sufficiently to discover, away inside, the little shy soul-thing, the naked ego, with its eerie eyes. Thus it is that when I first find myself in those early, misty recesses I see myself all dressed, dressed for company inspection; I am a little girl wearing a crispness of brown curl and a crispness of white muslin; I wear white stockings and Burt's shoes.--I recognize also, quite in the same way, as enveloping facts, without which I may not present myself unclothed to my fellows, that I have a peppery, passionate temper, and an imagination,--that is what seeing people in void air and talking to them is called. Thus clad<90> and ticketed, I go pattering along the pilgrimage. How little clothes mattered then! All spun about with fairy films and the witchery of talking trees and singing winds, I did not remember my clothes. But at times clothes broke in abruptly on my unconsciousness. I well remember a certain mitten. It was a brown mitten on my left hand. My mother and I were walking down a flight of stone steps. I slipped; my mother caught my hand, retained, not it, but the mitten, and I bumped unimpeded to the bottom. My baby resentment against that mitten endured long. It was a surprise, a disappointment, this treachery of the accepted; so my clothes were not to be trusted; it was well to keep half an eye on them. The mitten episode marks a step in my spiritual adjustment; my clothes might at any moment go back on me. It is a lesson I have not yet found it safe to unlearn. In those days there was a pleasant interest attached to the Burt's shoes,--not when new and shiny, but later, when they had become well worn. Some unexpected morning I would espy a peering bit of white stocking looking out from the blackness of the leather toe. The hole being not yet so large or so alarming as the cobbler's charges, a piece<91> of black silk was adjusted over the stocking, the foot deftly slipped into the shoe, a dash of blacking applied to the whole, and behold only mother and I knew the difference. Penury as such was not yet known to me. The consciousness of shabbiness had not yet frayed the elbows of my soul. The device was merely interesting, beguiling the tedium of the sanctuary, and affording meditation on the ingenuity of mothers. Here succeeded several years of tranquillity in my relations to my garments, until, at the age of six, I found myself--infelix!--removed to a town possessing a bleak climate and many woolen manufactories. It was the custom of the house mothers to buy flannel by the piece direct from the factory, red flannel, hot, thick, felled like a Laplander, and the invention of Lucifer. Out of this flannel was cut a garment, a continuous, all-embracing garment, of neuter gender, in which every child in that town might have been observed flaming Mephistophelian-like after the morning bath. A pattern was given to our mother. The hair shirt--I laugh when I read! By definition the hair shirt must have possessed geographical limits of attack, but my flannels left no pore untickled, untortured; they heated<92> the flesh until scarlet fever paled into a mere pleasantry; and they soured the milk of amiability within me forever. The rotation of the seasons reduced itself to terms of red flannel. In the autumn, when the happy fowls and foliage alike moulted, shed the superfluous, when bracing October set the body in a glow, I alone of living things must be done up in flannel! And more,--did you ever try to draw on your stocking smoothly over a red flannel tumor at the ankle, and then attempt to button over the whole the shoe that fitted snugly enough over nothing at all? Did you ever tear off shoe and stocking, and, dancing red-legged and barefooted, cry out in frenzy that you would eschew breakfast and school, aliment and enlightenment, but never, never, never again would you wear footgear? Thus autumn. And spring, that season of vernal bourgeoning, was the time when I, too, like any other seedkin, slipped free of all stuffy incasings, and could sprout and spring in air and sun, clad in blessed, blessed muslin. I shall never forget the corroding bitterness induced by flannels. At times they absolutely reduced me to fisticuffs with my religion, so that filial piety, the ordaining of the seasons, and the very catechism itself, hung in the balance of<93> the conflict. I believe I can hardly over-estimate the spiritual detriment done me by my flannels. One incident of this, my first decade, I recall with mingled respect and envy:-- "It is not now as it hath been of yore." "Choose," commanded my mother, "will you have a new dress this winter or `St. Nicholas' for next year?" I was stung at the implication that for such as me there could have been a doubt of the choice. "St. Nicholas," of course! A magazine doth not wax old as doth a garment, and besides, is not reading more than raiment? Alas for the high intellectuality of eight years old! If the choice lay now between the dress and the book, would I hug the volume and walk among my fellows gladly shabby? I would not. About at this same period we were visited by a family of strange little girls. There were three of them; they stayed three days, they changed their dresses three times a day, and they never wore the same dress twice. We regarded them as we might have regarded the fauna of Mars,--they were an utterly new thing. It was wonder at first, then pity, then wonder again, for we found that they liked it! Being little human animals even as we, they<94> would rather be tricked out in fresh frocks than play tag! What were we going to wear that evening, they asked. Why, how in the world should we know? Something clean, of course. Our visitors' bits of frocks were embroidered, beribboned, bevelveted in a manner simply incomprehensible. What in the world happened when they got dirty? That visit filled me with prophetic misgivings; some day I should have to wear stuff goods. In a vision I saw the great gulf that separates the grown-up who cannot be put through the wash-tub from the child who can. Horror of the unwashable! "Shades of the prison-house,"--Oh, no! Just here the retrospect reaches the place where the road turned; I do not say, forked, for it was not a question of alternatives; I was a woman-child, and I had to keep on in the only way. Hitherto my clothes had been as much or as little myself as the down of the chick, or the fur of the rabbit. Providence and my parents had provided my apparel without the faintest solicitude on my part, leaving me free to attend to my body and soul. This could not long endure. It is the era of Mother Hubbards that bridges together the old time and the new. The Mother Hubbard was so noteworthy, so startling, in fact,<95> after the trimness to which we were accustomed, this "Robe ungirt from clasp to hem." It swayed with a truly Hellenic undulation like the pictures in the mythology. I first admired, then coveted, then teased my mother into making me one. It was finished just after dinner, and though it was yet early for dressing, I put it on, and turned out upon the street, which, to my disappointment, was empty of children. There I strutted, and swelled, and waited for the others to come and see, and was exalted, not recognizing the first shackles of my slavery. Now, first, I become acquainted with Fashion; now, first, I regard other people's clothes as the most important factor in the production of my own. Too truly it is the close of the first chapter, the end of innocence, the end of joy, the end of sexlessness. I am irrevocably a woman: imitation and emulation are henceforth the distinguishing motives of my costume. Now, first, I look in the glass to see my frock, and then I look a little higher to see that face and that mop of curls I wear, and I wonder what colors best suit them. I look at the eyes, too, and at the secrets they tell me, and I wonder what external clothes<96> and conduct are most becoming to those eyes and to that inner meshed personality they reveal. What is becoming! The word is epitome of all that the grown-up is and the child is not. The period of my teens was the period when my wardrobe was continually in abeyance upon the higher claims of my education. It was not possible simultaneously to beautify my brain and my body. I acquiesced in the circumstance, for the most part, with occasional fits of passionate revolt, and more or less constant misanthropy. I blush to recall that at one time the light which was in me turned to darkness for a year or more, and all on account of my clothes. I found myself at a great city school, I a shy little country waif, most curiously clad. I looked at the clothes of my compeers, and I locked my lips and my heart against all converse with my fellows, and I walked to the top of my classes in a desolation of spirit that was tragic. I would have exchanged my monthly reports with those of my most addle-pated classmate if I could have had her clothes. Never since have I approached the intellectual achievement of fourteen; but the shabbiness of my motives was greater than that of my costume. The effect was not wholly<97> evil, but I here confess that I never should have learned Latin rules if I had been prettily dressed. I wanted to show those stylish misses that there was no backwoods brain under my backwoods hat--that was all! I attributed to others a snobbishness wholly my own, and for that once clothes came perilously near costing me all human joy in human friendship. If my wardrobe had never bettered, I might now be a female Diogenes,-- and incidentally have furnished meteoric display for a dozen universities. My clothes improved; I am not friendless, but dull and illiterate, and all through the shaping destiny of dress. This paragraph in my history yields me this much of philosophy as regards the influence of clothes on the social relations. My dress, so long as it be not conspicuous for disorder, disruption, or display, has much less effect on others than on myself. But as for myself, since I am a woman, and it is ordained of fate that I be forever subdued to what I wear, I shall never, except when I believe myself suitably dressed, be able to look my fellow creature in the eye with the level gaze of conscious equality which alone gains friendship. No woman was ever so proud as not to cringe in an ugly hat. No woman is ever so<98> happy as not to be made unhappy by her clothes. Let the dress reformers prattle to the breezes,--there is no exaltation like that of knowing one's costume stylish, becoming, and, if possible, expensive. Only by recognizing our limitations may we women successfully cope with them; one's own respect is surest guarantee of other people's; for women self-respect is soonest secured by clothes: therefore, O women, dress! I have digressed from the contemplation of my girlhood, but I have not exhausted that time, for I have not touched upon second-hand clothes or long dresses. As a girl I was perpetually made over. I came to regard fresh material as something almost sacrilegious. Of all gift-horses, clothes are the most difficult not to criticize, and especially old clothes. My prosperous cousins did not possess my complexion, my tastes, or my figure, and yet I inevitably succeeded to their clothes, so that I came to watch their expenditures with morbid interest, and if they asked for my advice, the strings of my sincerity were severely strained by "a lively sense of favors yet to come." In such circumstances it is well to have in the family one who is mother, dressmaker, and genius, all in one, for only such a combination of inspiration and devo<99>tion could have kept my head up in those days when I was always second-hand. To be honest, am I anything else now? What else is it to be fashionable? With brain or scissors every woman is snipping and clipping and cutting over other people's clothes to fit her figure; real clothes or clothes existent only in the fashion papers or her dressmaker's brain, but what is the difference? Every woman wears what somebody else has worn. What woman would wear a dress she had not first seen on another woman? Old clothes, making over, copying, copying, copying,--dear me, how second-hand we women are! The years from sixteen to twenty are those years in a woman's life when dress becomes an ecstasy--as never afterwards. We always look in the glass when we put on our hats, but at sixteen we look at the face, not the hat. It is not such a bad face to look at, at sixteen, with its eyes and lips of wonder. For some few years Heaven lets dress be a sheer delight, not the mere sordid comfort and decency of childhood, or the studied concealment of imperfections of maturity, but a revelation of the new self of which we are neither unconscious nor ashamed. It is but the working of natural laws; in the spring do<100> not the very trees prank themselves out in a vain glory of blossoms, do they not prink and preen in the mirroring water, arranging their leafy tresses, and bedecking themselves for the masculine regard of sunbeams and breezes? So girls, and many a one quite as unconsciously. The sap stirs and the leaf sprouts, and the stirring of the sap is a thrilling of new joy, and the leaf is a new and beautiful thing. What is it, what am I becoming? Look in the glass and see. That is womanhood burning in my eyes, on my cheeks,--Oh, yes, sir, you may look, too, if you wish. When my skirts have grown all the way down, and my braids all the way up, then there will be coronation robes ready, and a kingdom, and a king. Now I am only a schoolgirl, but it is all coming, coming, coming! Do you wonder that she counts each inch on her skirt in an agony of impatience, that she arranges her hair high on her head at night before her mirror? Schoolgirl nonsense, and something else. Then one day it is the hour at last,--it is the first long dress, cut to show the regal throat, trained like a queen's. The hair is piled up diadem-wise. The princess is ready. The color comes and goes, the slipper taps the floor--"I am all dressed for you. I am waiting. Come, Prince, hurry, hurry!"<101> But, O little Princess, it is not at all like what you think, really; so soon your long skirts will have ceased to tickle your toes with delight, and your coroneted tresses will seem to have grown that way. The Prince will have come, and you will have got used to him, or he will not have come, and you will have forgotten that you ever expected him; the clothes of womanhood will no longer be a rapture, but an obligation and a habit. You will find yourself wearing a personality restricted by that thing you have somehow acquired, called a style of your own, and restricted also by the style of all the other women in the world, so that you will find yourself wearing those dresses only, and saying those words only, that both yourself and others expect of you; it will not seem a very wonderful thing to be a woman, after all. But remember, Miss or Madam Princess, that you must still go on dressing, dressing, dressing to the end. What mockery to prate of the equality of the sexes when one sex possesses the freedom of uniform, and the other is the slave of ever-varying costume! Think of the great portion of a lifetime we women are condemned to spend merely on keeping our sleeves in style! Talk of our playing with scholarship<102> or politics when we are all our days panting disheveled after scampering Dame Fashion, who, all our broken-winded lives, is just a little ahead! Yet dress-reform is the first article in our creed of antipathies, and I, for one, am last of ladies to declare myself a heretic. I am not ungrateful for the gift of sex and species. Suppose I were a fowl of the air, what condemnation of hodden gray, and soul unexpressed either by vocal throat or personality of plumage! Among things furred or feathered it is the male who dresses and the lady who we